Given the eminence of the other speakers on yesterday's ABA panel regarding antitrust in the broadband world, it is not surprising that the discussion went far beyond debating various interpretations of the Supreme Court's Trinko decision. We also explored -- the Court's opinion aside -- the extent to which antitrust should serve as a backstop to FCC regulation.

But taking FCC regulation largely as given and then considering the proper role for antitrust may not go far enough; our talk raised issues that made me wish we had considered the interplay between antitrust and regulation more holistically. Given the general agreement that competitive analysis will be a critical element of the government's involvement with broadband going forward, policymakers should begin to develop consensus regarding which arm of government should conduct that analysis and why.

Kudos to the FTC for its announced multimillion dollar settlement today with ChoicePoint. (I'd use language so often seen in press releases and say "I applaud the FTC" but as I'm typing it's impossible for me to applaud.) ChoicePoint allowed the personal records of 163,000 consumers to be compromised, and the FTC says at least 800 identity theft cases resulted from that action. In the settlement, ChoicePoint will have to pay $10 million in civil penalties and another $5 million for consumer redress.

The two runts of the broadcast world have decided to combine rather than force each other into oblivion. CBS and Time Warner announced about an hour ago that their respective mini-networks -- UPN and WB -- will merge this fall into a network called CW (presumably Cbs and Wb, but I just see "conventional wisdom," and CW to me is "don't launch a new broadcast network").

The reduction from 6 broadcast networks to 5 most likely will be greeted with a yawn, a far cry from the intense media attention given to Fox's audacious launch of a 4th network some 20 years ago. Why? Because most consumers don't even distinguish the difference between broadcasting and cable channels anymore. This won't be treated any differently by some than when TNN rebranded itself Spike (actually that probably drew more due to Spike Lee's threatened legal action). But the consolidation is significant on several levels:

(I recently engaged my former Cato Institute colleague Jim Harper in a dialog about the effectiveness of U.S. engagement with China in terms of broadening human rights and speech rights in particular. I've been doing some soul-searching about this recently and asked Jim to help me think through the issue (and the "engagement is good" theory) again. What follows is the transcript of our e-mail exchange. A condensed version of this exchange also appaers on CNET today. - - Adam Thierer)

THIERER: Jim, I must admit, in recent months I have really been struggling with the issue of U.S. corporate engagement / investment in China. In particular, I have been wondering if my long-held assumption is correct: that greater engagement by U.S. companies in China will really help achieve meaningful reforms for its repressed citizenry. I have always argued that investment by U.S. companies - - and technology companies in particular - - could help break down some of the legal barriers to greater economic and social / cultural freedom.

In recent years, however, the reports from the front have not been good. It does not seem the U.S. corporate engagement / investment has really done much to effectuate positive reforms in the post-Tiananmen era. It seems that the Chinese are just as repressive as ever, especially on the political / cultural front. Worse yet, we know that many large American corporate technology leaders have actually assisted the efforts of Chinese officials when they sought to repress speech and dissent. (Microsoft, for example, has made news recently by shutting down a journalist's blog because of material that might be offensive to Chinese authorities. And Yahoo and Google are coming under fire for playing ball with Chinese officials too.)

Tell me my fellow libertarian friend, are you not also troubled by these developments? Are you still comfortable with our traditional position on the issue?

HARPER: I recall, a few years ago, being very concerned when I heard that Google had come to an agreement with the Chinese government so that their service would not be blocked there. I had a natural sense of revulsion at the thought that any company, much less one of the technology companies that are doing so much to improve life around the world, would get in bed with censors and despots. Google has never been as forthcoming about what exactly they do to appease the Chinese as I would like them to be, so I suppose I am still uncomfortable with it.

But I have come to believe that the best option for a company faced with this dilemma is to accept the ugly conditions some governments put on doing business in their countries. This is for a couple of reasons: There is strong evidence that refusing trade doesn't help anybody. The U.S. trade embargo toward Cuba has been a dismal failure. We've had some level of trade restrictions with Cuba for more than 40 years and, if anything, it has helped Castro by pauperizing the Cubans, demoralizing them, and shielding them from knowledge about the benefits of freedom. Heck, if we had had trade with Cuba the last 40 years, a steady diet of fast food probably would have killed off Fidel by now...

Just as importantly, if you give them the communications tools that these companies provide, the Chinese people will evade government controls and get done what we want them to get done, censorship or no censorship. You don't have to use words like "falun gong" or "Taiwan" or "free speech" to communicate about liberty and public issues. Before Vaclac Havel was the first President of a free Czechoslovakia, he was a playwright. His plays weren't political polemics that tweaked the nose of the government and invited censorship (though he got in plenty of trouble). They were subtle critiques of life under the regime. Everybody knew what he was talking about. Freedom had been in the hearts of the Czechs for years when the Velvet Revolution officially delivered it. Technology and communications are enabling this on a broader scale in China. It's working. You'll see.

The Economist's main editorial this week is on the challenges, and opportunities, that digitization gives to content companies. Noting the malaise in content companies equity prices, the migration of advertising revenues to the Internet, the decline in movie ticket and DVD sales, The Economist notes that the digitized, networked economy is hitting the content industries in the core of their business model. This seems right, and furthermore, the winds have yet to hit gale force, which they inevitably will.

At the same time, the editorial notes the remarkable staying power of content and the content companies' being good at marshaling the capital and creative talent to produce high quality (at least in production values, if not actual content) entertainment. In short, content is what people are willing to pay for over those high speed connections, and it is not likely that a garage entrepreneur is going to produce and create the next blockbuster film or TV series.

While sitting here in the Brussels airport waiting for my flight to Poland and I met some soldiers from the Swedish Army (yes, they have an army). Our common interest, as is should be, is the season Peter Forsberg is having with the Flyers. For what it's worth, the Swedish soldiers wish he still played for Colorado too.

In the background, the Belgian music channel is showing the video for Wang Chung's "Dance Hall Days." I am willing to admit that we Americans are unrepentant philistines as soon as Europe plays its part by not keeping cringe-inducing 1980s pop music alive. I understand the long tail, but really, Wang Chung?

The Coalition to Keep America has attacked the PFF DACA Universal Service proposal. Ray Gifford has offered one quick response here, in "Hysteria is the sincerest form of flattery...."

I'm in Europe now and haven't read the Coalition's paper yet, only the first page. As Ray said, a full response will be forthcoming. But the following sentence from the the second paragraph immediately caught my eye: "Rural investment may or may not be economically efficient, but that is (fortunately) not a requirement for good public policy." A position that denigrates economic efficiency right at the very outset evidences a deep misunderstanding concerning how economic efficiency enhances consumer welfare. A position that specifically delinks economic efficiency from sound public policy right at the outset should be a red alert that someone's special interest is being protected--not the consumers' interest.

Writing this from Europe, where it is fashionable in many countries and here in Brussels as well to speak ill of economic efficiency and speak well instead of "good public policy", growth is on a flat-line. The Europeans who understand that the US growth rate of 3-4% sure beats flat-lining are looking for new ways to achieve greater economic efficiency.

All of this is not to say, of course, that a universal service program does not have an continuing role to play in US telecom policy. The PFF proposal argues it does. It is to say, however, that it does not serve US consumers to try to maintain a system that is consciously economically inefficient when we can move towards one that is more economically efficient while, at the same time, keeping people connected with new and innovative services.

As James Carville would say, it's the consumers we're trying to protect, stupid! Not specific rural telephone companies.

The Senate Commerce Committee held yet another hearing yesterday about "cleaning up" content on broadcast TV, cable & satellite TV, and the Internet too. One Senator after another, as well as some of the typical media critics who get called to testify at these things, made the claim that parents are helpless in the face of all the media that bombards their kids these days. But what's so troubling about such calls for increased media regulation / censorship in the name of "protecting children" is that it ignores the fact that parents have many constructive alternatives to censorship at their disposal.

Let's start with some basics.

Those fans of regulatory jawboning for a la carte offerings might want to instead do all in their power to bring about more broadband deployment at faster speeds. The Internet -- and IPTV -- create a true a la carte environment where consumers don't choose individual channels, but individual programs.

I still would guess that the business model will involve a great deal of bundling of programming choices (they must, after all, be paid for somehow) to consumers, but the Internet is the ultimate market driver to a la carte choices.

And this is what scares the bejeebers out of networks...and it should. As we have seen with the travel agencies, and big media, the Internet disintermediates markets, challenging "middlemen" like networks or newspapers to either add value or go quietly into the night...

Echostar CEO Charlie Ergen, who is burdened by a propensity for candor, gave away the endgame of a la carte mandates clear in the Senate Commerce Committee testimony yesterday. He will do a la carte offerings to consumers if Congress authorizes the FCC to regulate the programmers. It seems, you see, these programmers have rather unique goods, for which they can extract a lion's share of the producer surplus paid by viewers to operators. If only the FCC regulates away what is, in essence, the situational monopoly power that, say, Disney has with ESPN, will operators be able to at last give Americans their deep, abiding, just-discovered right to a la carte programming.

Of course, I see no reason to stop there. After all, what is a channel other than a bundle of programs, some of which I don't want to see. Accordingly, the regulatory power must be extended so I have the "right" to only purchae certain programs, not whole channels. Likewise, because the news pages of the Wall Street Journal drive me batso because of their unrelenting wet blanket distaste for enterprise and property, I want the right to only buy the editorial page, where I get a reassuring dose of pro-market thinking. If we are comfortable with regulation defining acceptable content offerings, there is no compelling reason to stop at the channel level, or the bundled newspaper level.

This a la carte right of mine must be exercised everywhere!